Official Synopsis:
Academy Award winners Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland sparkle in this debut comedy from Academy Award-winning writer-director Billy Wilder. A frustrated city girl (Rogers) decides to disguise herself as a youngster in order to get a cheaper train ticket home. But little "Sue Sue" finds herself in a whole heap of grown-up trouble when she hides out in a compartment with handsome Major Kirby (Milland) and he insists on taking her to his military academy after the train is stalled. This "memorable comedy" (Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide) is a laugh-out-loud classic for all ages!
  
Our Take:
Billy Wilder’s American directorial debut, The Major and the Minor, is finally on DVD.  The film is written by Wilder (along with his first screenwriting partner, Charles Brackett) and displays some of the wry sensibilities that have marked Wilder films ever since.   The film, like Wilder’s later comedies, takes something not so light, in this case practically statutory rape, and spins it into an amazing comedy.  If your eyes popped seeing the words “statutory rape,” please allow me to explain.  The dramatic conflict of the film is the blooming romance between Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland, but while Rogers is of age, Milland believes the character to be only twelve years old.  The film escapes the ick factor of this simply by keeping the audience in the know from the beginning.  We all know she is not really twelve years old, so we go with it, but when the movie ended and I actually thought about what the film would have been if it were shot from Milland’s perspective instead of Rogers’; it would have been quite unsavory.  Yet, that minor aspect aside, the film is one of many major Wilder comedic triumphs.

The Major and the Minor, released for the first time on DVD in the United States, is part of Universal’s Cinema Classics collection and contains the following:

* Exclusive Introduction by Robert Osborne (2 minutes).

* Theatrical Trailer.

The Major and the Minor may not be major Wilder (no pun intended), but such a thing as minor Wilder does not even exist thanks to how utterly talented he was.  The film, while not as layered as later Wilder comedies, provides enough excellent lines and laughs to make it…

RECOMMENDED!

Overall Picture:
Movie: B+
DVD:   C+

- Matthew Orlando
Staff Writer